A long long time ago, or that is how it feels, I was new to the idea of Otherkin and found myself considering many simple questions regarding it as a whole.
Things like:
How common is this?
Why haven't I heard about it before?
Mental disorder?
So on so forth. I found myself trying to disprove the possibility. There is one thing that made me change my approach more than anything else. Something that made me consider that I was merely assuming things when it came to how common/uncommon or "new" it is.
It was a simple school project on ancient Greece. I was flipping through a site on the internet, looking up information on ancient Greek scientists. Amongst mathematicians, inventors of a crude vending machine, and the like, I found phylosophers that believed in reincarnation. One interested me more than most.
Empedocles believed he had lived before, not just as various humans but also as a fish, and a bush. Before all that he believed that he had originally been a immortal being, a "daimôn", who was cast down into mortal life as punishment for his crimes.
Quote:There is a decree of necessity, ratified long ago by gods, eternal and sealed by broad oaths, that whenever one in error, from fear, defiles his own limbs, having by his error made false the oath he swore - daimôns to whom life long-lasting is apportioned – he wanders from the blessed ones for three-times countless years, being born throughout the time as all kinds of mortal forms, exchanging one hard way of life for another. For the force of air pursues him into the sea, and sea spits him out onto earth's surface, earth casts him in the rays of blazing sun, and sun into the eddies of air; one takes him from another, and all abhor him. I too am now one of these, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, having put my trust in raving Strife.
I read that piece of text and blinked and read it again. People had had these beliefs, one way or another, for much longer than I had guessed. Otherkin was merely a new word, not a new philosophy. (Trust the Greek to beat us to it.)
This is the thing that made me join internet communities and start exploring the possibility that what I'd always know was something that could be "right" in some manner. And it is something I want to share with you all. An insight into a person who believed himself to be kin, long before the word even came up.
Source links:
http://www.in2greece.com/english/history...docles.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empedocles
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/empedocl.htm